Doom

Doom was one of the first First Person Shooters and is widely regarded as putting the fledgeling genre on the map. Notably, Doom was the first game to make the obvious crossover between first person perspective games and pants-shitting terror.

Doom Marine approaches Critical Testicular Mass
Doom Marine approaches Critical Testicular Mass

Just The Facts

  1. Doom is a series of video games made (initially) by id Software
  2. Doom is a First Person Shooter
  3. The first instalment of Doom was released in 1993
  4. Doom mainly focuses around one badass space marine single-handedly taking on the hordes of hell!

Cracked on Doom

While not the first of the now-ubiquitous genre, Doom was so influential that for years after its release, any new FPS was often referred to in media as a “Doom game” or “Doom clone”. Doom’s explosion into the video game market is what gave us celebrated titles like Half-Life, FarCry and Bioshock.

Doom gave us the Standard Progression of Guns where you start with a pistol, move on to shotgun and pretty much stick with it for the rest of the game. Okay fine, then there's a machine gun, something that makes explosions and then the obligatory few fancy things.

 

And did you really think we'd neglect to mention the BF-fucking-G 9000 (if you don't know what it stands for, maybe you shouldn't be reading Cracked)

Doom’s cultural influence goes so far that even its distinct door-opening FWOOSH sound effect has been used everywhere from 24 to Galaxy Quest.  

After its predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D ended with a battle with giant robot Hitler, there was seriously nowhere to go with villains except going to war against hell itself. And that’s exactly what Doom did.

Doom in Other Media

The Doom series has (hell)spawned three main games (so far), in addition to console versions, a series of novels, a board game and a hilarious comic book.


Hollywood even had a shot at Doom by making a movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but decided to make it about a bunch of guys fighting genetically-engineered monsters ... and that’s seriously all we allowed ourselves to remember about it.